Is Trump About to Sell Out South Korea?

Rushed Meeting In May With Kim Jong Un Could Further Expose "Dealmaker-In-Chief" As a Fraud

Nicholas Kristof: “President Trump reportedly has accepted an invitation from Kim Jong-un for a summit in Pyongyang, North Korea’s grand capital of empty avenues. It’s … a dangerous gamble and a bad idea.”

“What North Korean leaders have craved for many years is international respect and credibility; they want to be treated as equals by the Americans, so a scene of Trump and Kim standing side by side would constitute a triumph for Pyongyang.”

“So a visit by a sitting American president to North Korea would be a huge gift to Kim, and it’s puzzling that our Great Dealmaker should give up so much right off the bat.”

“The more normal procedure would be, first, to negotiate our way toward the summit and make sure that we extract every possible concession, and, second, make sure that the summit serves the larger goals of resolving the nuclear crisis.”

“Frankly, another concern about a Trump-Kim summit is that our president will impetuously agree to some harebrained scheme to get a deal. (‘Withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea and from Okinawa? No problem, if you’ll build a wall for me.’)”

Joan Walsh: “No one should lie under oath, but doing so ought to disqualify an attorney-general nominee from the job. However, that’s essentially what Attorney General Jeff Sessions admitted doing Thursday afternoon in a bizarre press conference […]

“It is the scenario that President Trump’s most conservative followers considered their worst nightmare, and on Wednesday it seemed to come true: The dealmaking political novice, whose ideology and loyalty were always fungible, cut a […]